Loyalty - An Emotional Attachment

Nov 06, 2017

Loyalty

It seems like every week I experience some kind of an "aha" moment so here goes mine for this week. Allow me to share.

One of the most beautiful things I get to witness every week is seeing strangers and jiujiteros from all over the country visiting our community space. With "Aku Eyes" they can't believe what they are seeing. Many times after rolling, we would sit around and talk. The questions and comments I hear all the time is " I can't believe you guys are doing this!" Or " I wish there were are shops like this at home!"

This week a young lady asked me " Why are you doing this? How do you make money?" I smiled with joy and replied " We want to build a community for change and to build a community, we must give...Imagine if you had to pay every time you go to your neighborhood park and play ball with your friends...would you still go there weekly?"

Our goals from the beginning were very simple. Do not make the financial part of the business our number one goal. It's part of the overall vision but it's not the first one on our list. We know that for us to build a raving-fan-loyal-customers base, first we must build a raving-fan-loyal- partners (employees).

We want to be known as a humanistic company that operates mostly on emotional intelligence rather than driven by statistical data. We want to build value to a society as a whole, not just shareholders or investors (at the moment we don't have either). Our goal is to make our neighbors proud and hopefully spread it to our city of Kaka'ako, then eventually Honolulu. In due time, it will reach across the Pacific and the virus will continue to spread. We are hoping people (employees, customers, suppliers, partners) who interact with us feel safe, secure, and happy anytime they work with us. We would imagine they would want us as their trusted friend where they feel safe buying, selling and investing with us. Kekoa is a family not a corporation.

We want to create the following values: emotional, experiential, spiritual, social, and lastly, financial. All these values will help us stay true to our mission "Kekoa Collective - A soulful company" as we all know, without soul we have no direction or purpose.

Yes, we want our customers to have this emotional attachment to our brand. Once we achieve that we will have a customer for life. It is with this long term vision, that we base all of our day to day decisions on.

In short, loyalty cannot be bought or forced. It is a slow romance that builds upon values first then trust and finally our actions.

It's funny, we are more concerned about making others happy first than with our own happiness because we know happiness is like a cold; it spreads like wild fire. Since we are a byproduct of that, we get super happy too.